Aahooo! Zombies of London...

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2006)

28 Days Later is a post-apocalyptic horror movie whose excitements fail to outweigh its disappointments. Director Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting fame, has endeavored to bring the schlocky zombie-movie routines of George Romero up-to-date by pumping them full of extreme-cinema steroids; the result is a tottery fusion of Romero and Gaspar Noe, a gory splatter-movie adorned with the trappings of a visceral Euro-art-film.
The intriguing set-up involves a bicycle-courier named Jim (Cillian Murphy), who awakes from a coma to find the whole of London apparently abandoned. What Jim doesn't know is that the country has been overrun by a strange infection unleashed from a laboratory, and that most of the people have been turned into raving, bloodthirsty maniacs. The story then becomes a familiar survivors vs. zombies scenario: Jim meets a pair of toughies named Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomie Harris), who've learned to kill the homicidal Infecteds with Molotov cocktails, and to subsist on candy and soda. After Mark is bitten by a zombie and mercifully macheted, Jim and Selena encounter a father-and-daughter named Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns), who have a crank-up radio and a gassed-up taxi, and convince Jim and Selena to accompany them to Manchester, where there may or may not be a military base.
Some of this is genuinely creepy. The initial images of the deserted London streets, shot on DV and digitally altered to remove traffic and other signs of human habitation, are eerie and bleak, evoking the end of the world as envisaged by Lars Von Trier. If Boyle didn't insist on going for the jugular with almost every shot, the movie might be a classic. The problem is that there isn't any real suspense, because Boyle doesn't allow the suspense to build. It's hard to become involved in the plight of the characters when the director is constantly trying to dazzle you with jump-cuts, and loud music, and bursts of violence that would be punctuative if the rest of the film weren't at the same manic pitch already. The story, weak to begin with, completely disintegrates in the second half. The survivors are taken by soldiers to a secluded manor surrounded by mines and floodlights, and anyone who's seen a George Romero movie immediately suspects that the soldiers are up to no good.
It's amazing how fast a stylish, high-intensity movie can become a deadly bore. The actors, some of whom seem fairly talented, are given no chance by Boyle to assert their personalities, so the film becomes a nearly-dehumanized exercise in technique. And even more disappointing are the zombies; Boyle can think of nothing more creative for them to do than hiss like bad-movie vampires and vomit blood. Romero at least always bothered to give some of his lurching undead funny little bits of personality, and used them for satiric jabs. Boyle may be more accomplished visually than Romero, but he's nowhere near Romero's class when it comes to old-fashioned schlock-meistering.